Dave Averill, Customer Success Manager at the Salesforce.com Foundation posted about selecting the right partner for a journey toward CRM. Below are some of the highlights from his post that give some great food for thought when starting down the CRM road. For the full post and all of Dave’s advice, jump over to the original here on the always relevant Salesforce Foundation blog.

Over the years I, Dave Averill, have talked to many customers on their journey toward Salesforce and CRM “nirvana”. Choosing the right partner to walk this road with you can be difficult. Below are some strategies that I recommend when you are trying to select a partner.

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Yesterday was the final day of Blackbaud’s #bbcon conference in DC. As sessions were winding down and the exhibition hall was closing, we definitely saw fewer tweets. There were only 2,144 tweets mentioning #bbcon yesterday, but that brings the grand total of tweets from Sunday to Tuesday to over 8,500! Thanks again to Blackbaud for donating a $1/tweet to a local DC charity.

The speakers mentioned the most on Tuesday were @JimZBuildOn with 72 mentions during his keynote, @TedHart with 52 mentions and @billconnorscfre with 45 mentions during his #retrickygifts session.

I wasn’t sure that #bbcon day 2 could top day 1, but I was wrong! 3,852 tweets containing #bbcon happened today, bringing the grand total of tweets to 6,903 which is just under $7,000 donated to National Children’s Society from Blackbaud so far.

As you can see by the graph above, attendees were most active during the 10 am sessions and the 3 o’clock sessions (graph is in Mountain Time). The most popular sessions were #bbconsocial, #regeeks and #npnext with 274, 253 and 235 tweets respectively.

While communication is a big part of making your Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) implementation a success, having a good project manager also plays a huge role. This person will be the primary point person for the project and will lead the change management. Think of them as the hub, the wheel with many spokes on it, keeping the implementation on track. They will spend a lot of time up front carefully creating a plan and gaining the investment of the stakeholders. For more information on what creates a successful CRM implementation, be sure to check out our CRMready webinar series.